Original reporting and feature articles on the latest privacy developments

Serwin Brings Privacy Team to MoFo

Morrison & Foerster bolstered its privacy team significantly this week with the addition of Andrew Serwin, CIPP/US, CIPP/E, CIPP/G, Peter McLaughlin, CIPP/US, and Daniel Muto, CIPP/US, who’ve all made the jump from Foley & Lardner. They join the likes of Miriam Wugmeister, chair of MoFo’s Global Privacy and Data Security Group, Reed Freeman, CIPP/US, Andrew Smith, Rick Fischer and more than 60 other partners and counsel working in privacy and data security.

Why did Serwin make the move from Foley, where he founded the privacy group 10 years ago? “We now have the deepest team out there,” Serwin said in an interview with the IAPP. “Privacy has gotten to a point where you can’t just have certain areas of expertise.”

Serwin feels that the strengths he, McLaughlin and Muto bring in healthcare, litigation, dealing with the FTC and cybersecurity combine particularly well with the strengths MoFo already had.

“My conclusion,” Serwin said, “was that MoFo had much more experience internationally with Miriam, and they have Reed in advertising, Andrew Smith with FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act), Rick Fischer in financial services. Now we can say, ‘We have leading expertise in every area you could want.’”

Serwin, himself, is no slouch, having penned InformationSecurity and Privacy: A Guide to Federal and State Law Compliance and InformationSecurity and Privacy: A Guide to International Law and Compliance, which collectively form a 4,000-page, three-volume work on privacy and security law, as well as represented a number of firms in high-profile FTC enforcement matters. And McLaughlin is a nationally recognized HIPAA expert, having served as global privacy lead at Cardinal Health.

But Serwin said his business leanings were also important in making this a good fit. For privacy growth markets, he said he feels healthcare is an obvious one, considering the new HIPAA rule, which makes it “important to have deep bench strength” in health care.

“I also think litigation will continue to be a hot area,” Serwin said. “I think the FTC is only going to keep being more aggressive in its enforcement. I think cybersecurity is important and even going beyond privacy. The market will change over time…Security is going to become a business issue. It’s going to be a CEO-level issue. That’s going to be a growth area and Morrison is really well positioned for those issues.”

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